South Africa: Byrd, O’briain in Sunshine Tour’s Rookie of the Year Race

At face value, the Rookie of the Year race for the 2017/18 Sunshine Tour season seems to be a bit of a tortoise and hare affair between Zack Byrd of the United States and Neil O’Briain of Ireland.

The pair get a chance to settle who will win the Bobby Locke Trophy for the season at this week’s Tour Championship which gets underway on Thursday at Serengeti Estates.

Last year’s winner of the Bobby Locke Trophy was Christiaan Bezuidenhout, who will be playing at Serengeti to see his successor crowned.

Recent winners of the trophy named for one of South Africa’s greatest golfers have included the likes of Haydn Porteous, Dylan Frittelli and Canada’s Graham DeLaet.

Byrd got his name on the board early on in the season with his share of second in the Royal Swazi Open in may last year. That big cheque saw him take a lead that looked almost unassailable as other rookies on the tour battled to emulate that kind of performance.

Byrd followed that with a pair of top 10s, one in the Lombard Insurance Classic in Swaziland, and the other in the opening Origins of Golf event at Highland Gate. He’s kept his hand in with eight other finishes in the money during his 16 starts.

And then came the third-place finish by O’Briain in the lucrative Dimension Data Pro-Am.

The Irishman had played most of his golf during the South African winter on the Challenge Tour.

On his return to the Sunshine Tour, he made just two cuts ahead of his performance at Fancourt in February. He achieved that after having to qualify for the tournament. That performance edged him R14 372 ahead of Byrd.

With both players inside the top 50 of the Sunshine Tour Order of Merit, they will get the opportunity to take their duel down to the wire at Serengeti Estates.

If either wins, or finishes in any position down to fourth, and the other finishes below him, that would be enough to clinch the Bobby Locke Trophy. Any position below that, and they each have to rely on the other finishing at least two positions – and more, the further down the 42-man field they finish – behind in order to win.

Will it be the ‘slow and steady start’ approach of Byrd, or the ‘fast finish’ by O’Briain which will triumph?